We're joined on this episode by our old friend Jennifer Rubin, head of the ESG Practice Group for Mintz, based in the San Diego office, who will give us her insights into fast-moving legislation in the CA Capitol to require companies to list pay ranges with job postings and to report a wide range of salary data to the state. 

August is traditionally one of the busiest and most volatile months of the California legislative season, as lawmakers, lobbyists and activists all push to get their favorite bills to the finish line or to kill the ones they oppose. One of the more closely watched bills this month has been CA SB 1162, a gender pay equity measure introduced by Sen. Monique Limón, a Democrat who represents SD 19, which covers much of Santa Barbara and Ventura Counties. 

The many tenets of this bill include: 

By 2027, California companies with 250 or more workers would be required to submit salary data for their workers to the state, with an emphasis on breaking the data down between gender, race and ethnicity. 

Companies with 15 or more workers would also be required to provide employees with the pay scale for any job they currently hold, and to list the pay scales for positions in any job postings. 

 It would impose fines on companies that don’t adhere to a 2020 CA law that requires the state’s largest employers to collect wage data and report the information to the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing. 

But lawmakers also stripped out a amendment that would have required the state to make public the wage data that companies submit to it, a tenet that had drawn intense opposition from the business community.